She is an expert on international election observation, election fraud, and democracy promotion. She has served as an international election observer with several organizations in Afghanistan, Albania, Indonesia, Liberia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Venezuela, and she has worked with the Carter Center, the National Democratic Institute, Democracy International, the International Republican Institute, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems on democracy promotion issues and researching how democracy promoting organizations can evaluate the effects of their work. In cooperation with the Carter Center, she has piloted methods for introducing the random assignment of short term election observers to the deployment plans used by international observers.

At Yale, she is a resident fellow at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), and is a faculty affiliate of the MacMillan Center and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006, when she received the Juan Linz Award for the best dissertation in the comparative study of democracy, and was the official runner up for the Helen Dwight Reid Award for the best dissertation in international history, law, or politics. She has held residential fellowships at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.

Her first book, "The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm", was published by Cornell University Press in 2011. It won the International Studies Association's 2012 Chadwick Alger Prize for the best book on international organization and multilateralism, APSA's 2012 Comparative Democratization Section best book award, and the 2012 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for the best book on an international topic by a member of the Yale ladder faculty. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics,Political Analysis, and World Politics. She has contributed to a several edited volumes and other publications. With Nikolay Marinov, she has complied the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) dataset, which is freely available to other scholars and practitioners, and provides detailed data on all national elections throughout the world from 1945-2010.